TimpossibleOne wrote:
My iPad 6th gen has the option to run the public beta for iOS 18 and it has the same A10 Fusion chip as the iPad 7th gen, which is among the listed devices to get iOS 18, so why isn't the 6th gen iPad getting it?
Apple is not here, but a likely answer is simply that the 6th-generation iPad does not have enough RAM.
The 6th- and 7th-generation iPads may both have Apple A10 Fusion processors, but the 7th-generation iPad has 3 GB of RAM, and the 6th-generation one has only 2 GB of RAM. I have not done an exhaustive scan of MacTracker, but I believe that every iPhone and iPad that is compatible with production versions of iOS / iPadOS 18 has at least 3 GB of RAM. Some iPhones have as much as 8 GB of RAM, and some iPad Pros have as much as 16 GB.
Apple may have decided that iOS / iPadOS 18 would not run well in 2 GB of RAM – or that it was not worth limiting the features available to newer iPhones & iPads in order to support old devices with only 2 GB of RAM.
In any event, when Apple introduced the 6th-generation iPad in March 2018, it ran iOS 11.3. Since you can update that iPad to iPadOS 17, that means that Apple supported it with six major version updates.